This is about a movie that inspired a book that became a movie that inspired a book.

Dizzy yet?

Dizzying may be the best way to describe the journey children’s author Brian Selznick has been on, a journey that culminates Sunday night at the Academy Awards. “Hugo,” based on one of his books, is up for 11 Oscars, including best picture. It’s the most-nominated film of the year.

“I was asked when I was writing the book if I thought it could be made into a movie and I was adamant that it couldn’t, that the subject matter just wouldn’t translate,” Selznick said. “Then Scorsese called, and it turns out it can be a movie.”

Selznick, 45, who lives much of the year in La Jolla, will be attending the Oscars ceremony in Hollywood, sitting in the same auditorium as Martin Scorsese, the director, and other members of the cast and crew who have become his friends. He’s the rare author pleased with Tinseltown’s treatment of his work.

“My experience with ‘Hugo’ couldn’t have been better,” he said. “They all had a very clear love of my book and my characters, and they transformed something that I had done into something that needed to exist as a film.”

His book, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” was released in 2007. Selznick drew inspiration from the life of Georges Méliès, a French cinema pioneer, particularly his groundbreaking 1902 movie, “A Trip to the Moon.”

Méliès is a character in the book, a shopkeeper in the 1930s Paris train station where the 12-year-old orphan Hugo lives. Their pasts intertwine and their secrets unfold around the mystery of an automaton.

Selznick did a little groundbreaking of his own with the book, using pictures and words to create something that resembled a silent film on paper. “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” was a New York Times best-seller and won the Caldecott Medal, the top prize in children’s picture books.

A copy of it wound up in Scorsese’s house, where his wife, Helen, and daughter Francesca, now 12, read it. Both were captivated. His wife reportedly went to Scorsese — best known for such violent, R-rated fare as “Goodfellas” and “The Departed” — and said, “Come on, Marty, finally make a movie that your daughter can see!”

An extra boost

Filming was done mostly on a set in London. Selznick visited early on and was struck by how many people he saw walking around with copies of his book in their hands.

He remembers first seeing the metal grate that Hugo uses to sneak in and out of his hidden apartment, a grate that doesn’t exist at the real Paris train station Selznick used as the model for the book.

“That looks like the one I drew,” he told set designer Dante Ferretti.

“It’s exactly the one you drew,” said Ferretti, a two-time Oscar winner whose work on “Hugo” earned him another nomination for art direction.

Seven months into the filming, Selznick returned for what was supposed to be a one-day visit to watch the production. He had a feeling someone might invite him back to see more, and had blocked off two weeks on his schedule. He wound up staying all two weeks.

Fascinated by extras, the hundreds of nameless people who fill the backgrounds of various scenes, he arrived early one day to watch them getting ready. It turned out they needed another extra for the movie’s final scene, a fancy cocktail party, and would he be interested?

He was.

They sent him off to get his hair cut and be fitted for a costume. Then he was told he would have a speaking line, said to Ben Kingsley, who plays Méliès. (Selznick’s line: “When can I sign up?”) Then he was told he would have to say the line with a British accent, and was given lessons by a vocal coach.

The whole thing got a little unreal. “I can’t tell you how unbelievable it was to be on the set, surrounded by people I made up, directed by Martin Scorsese,” he said. (In the film, he also can be seen a couple of times in the background at the party.)

Selznick returned near the end of the production and watched the filming of a pivotal scene, shot on a bridge, where Méliès’ goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloë Moretz), asks Hugo (Asa Butterfield) where he lives.

In the book, he refuses to tell her, and they argue, and she follows him home. In screenwriter John Logan’s script, Isabelle asks and Hugo simply raises his arm and points to the station.

Then he watched the filming, and “Asa stops, looks at her, and you can see in his face all these decisions being made: Should he trust her? Will it be OK? And then he lifts his arm slowly and it is a totally beautiful moment.

“I couldn’t see from the words on the page how that would work. John, he knew. That was a huge education for me in what a screenplay does, how you tell a story on film.”

Logan is among those nominated for an Oscar.

Payback

Selznick’s book was the inspiration for “Hugo,” so maybe it’s fitting the movie gave him a book right back: “The Hugo Movie Companion: A Behind the Scenes Look at How a Beloved Book Became a Major Motion Picture.” He worked on it when he visited the set.

Published in November, it has interviews with cast and crew, photos from the set and drawings from the original book. Scorsese, up for a directing Oscar, wrote an essay on the birth of film. Selznick’s partner, David Serlin, a UCSD professor, wrote one on automatons. The last chapter is about the cocktail party scene and how it was filmed.

The movie has not done well commercially — it cost more than $150 million to make, according to media reports, and has taken in less than $70 million at the domestic box office — and its makers are hoping for a strong post-Oscars bounce.

“The Invention of Hugo Cabret” is enjoying a bounce of its own, thanks to the movie — a second life on the Times’ best-seller list for children’s chapter books. Last Sunday, it was at No. 2. At No. 9 was “Wonderstruck,” Selznick’s newest novel, which came out in September. He said there’s been talk — exciting this time, not dizzying — about turning it into a film, too.